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June 2005

So after the Birds of a Feather session on blogs and wikis yesterday afternoon, one which spurred some interesting convesation, Tom, Ben and Amy Pearl (who I’d link to if she had a blog) and I got into about a four-hour conversation about why there aren’t more women blogging, and why there aren’t more women teachers blogging, and what, if anything, to do about that. There’s been a lot written on this topic in the general blogosphere of late, about the lack of women in technology all around. But last night we focused on edblogging. Out of the 83 edbloggers I have in my Bloglines account, only 10 are women, and out of those, only half blog even somewhat consistently.
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So I’ve been missing what seems to be a really incredible NECC gathering in Philly this year, ironically just down the road from me. I’m in the midst of two planning days for my district (yesterday and today) that are keeping me until 3 pm. The conversation yesteday was good, but my mind was thinking about the sessions I was missing, and by the time I got down to the convention center at 4 yesterday, most all of the good stuff was already over. It’ll be the same today, though I will be able to make the birds of a feather at 4:45. The blog panel is tomorrow morning, which, thankfully, I’ll be able to make. Hopefully there will be some stragglers left to see us.

The good news is there are so many more people using the tools and blogging and podcasting that the virtual NECC is a pretty decent replacement for actually being there. Tim writes about how much more awareness of blogs there was this year. Craig says that Bernie Dodge’s new WebQuest tool has a blog and wiki function built in. Steve writes that like last night’s podcasting reception by Apple was HUGE. Andy Carvin has posted a podcast of his “Educational Luminaries” panel which I’ve loaded in my iPod for the trip down today. As I have Kelly Dumont’s who covered the Apple event as well.

And despite my angst at not being able to take part in all the fun, this is what the Read/Write Web was built for. I can learn from all of the people who are there and who are willing to share their experiences. Not quite as good as being there, in this case, but pretty good nonetheless. Hopefully, I’ll be doing some sharing from some sessions tomorrow.

So I lucked out and got a chance to chat with NECC keynote speaker David Weinberger for about 45 minutes before he gave his address yesterday. Steve Burt from Clarity had set it up and he invited me to tag along. (Hopefully, he’ll be posting the audio soon.) It was, um, hard to put into words, actually.

A summary of his address is posted on his blog, (David Warlick blogged the speech here as well) and there is no doubt that he has a powerful vision of the changes that are taking place due to the web, and what it means for education. Basically, he said that we have to change the way we think about what knowledge is, from something that is absolute to something that is constantly evolving. The idea of socially created and negotiated knowledge is so different from our traditional concept of something that is necessarily right or wrong. That, he said, was the application of mathematical knowledge to all other forms, a mistake that early civilizations made. But today, when everything is connected, when knowledge is “drag and drop,” he said that “the idea that we need the best possible knowledge doesn’t stand” any longer. That in most disciplines, there can be many answers that are good enough, and that the “system of power finds that very difficult” to deal with.

The idea, then, that the best curriculum is set by one person or entity is “hugely problematic.” In fact, he said, knowledge has been a social experience forever, and to try to remove that aspect from it “drains the blood” from it. Humans can’t get to perfection as the Web has made abundantly clear. So we have to stop trying to fit everyone into the same scope of knowledge. Making the change to a time when schools stop evaluating how individual students remember knowledge and instead evaluate how groups of students contruct knowledge is going to take a generation, he said.

He covered most of this in his keynote, which I think left most people in the audience with a head full of questions. This is not easy stuff for educators in general, I think, the idea that we don’t own the knowledge. It’s what is making it so hard for many schools to adopt these tools in the first place.

But what made the interview much different from the address was his deep frustration and depression, really, over where he sees the Internet heading. Yesterday’s Grokster and Brand X cases were the latest in a series of events that he said may spell the end of the Internet as we know it. It’s much more complex than what I can put up here now, and I’ll try to get the MP3 available. At the very least, at some point I’ll transcribe it. But suffice to say it was an opinion that he wasn’t ready to share with the NECC audience, and one that I think he sincerely hopes he’s wrong about. And frankly, so do I.

So I was hoping to “officially” announce this bit of news before NECC, and since I haven’t left for Philly yet, I guess I made it. I’ve just signed an agreement with Corwin Press to publish an Ed Blogwikirssfurlflickrmediacast Book which will hopefully be at a bookseller near you by the end of the year. The tentative title is “The Educator’s Guide to Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Cool Tools That are Transforming the Classroom.” Long, I know. I wanted something more Read/Write Webby, but at this point, I think blatantly obvious is better.

I struggled with this a few months ago, because a book about collaborative Web technologies just didn’t seem very, well, collaborative. I thought it should be a wiki. But in the end, with prodding from some of my edblogging buddies, I decided to pursue paper because I really think the vast majority of teachers still need a more traditional introduction to the Read/Write Web. The first draft is about 95% done, and what Iíve realized is that itís much less a book about the technologies than it is a book about some really, really inspiring and creative people who have seen the potential and acted upon it. Much more, I’m sure, later.

The second bit of “news” is that sometime around four years ago this week, I started blogging. (I think that makes me about 53 in “blog” years.) And I must say, it’s been an amazing four years. I know I have said this before, but aside from my wonderful wife and my two bratty kids, I can’t think of much that has taught me more and changed me more than this regular practice of reading, writing and learning. To many, that probably sounds like a sad commentary on my life, but those who know me know I consider it a blessing, if there is such a thing. Part passion, part calling (maybe?), part addiction. These are world changing technologies, and I feel so very lucky to have stumbled upon them when I did.

So, I’m off to NECC for tonight’s keynote by David Weinberger (preview here), some networking on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and then the panel Thursday morning. (Unfortunately I have commitments during the day tomorrow and Wednesday that I can’t escape.) If you’re around, please stop by the edblogger meet-up on Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 in PACC 204 A and say hello.

If I wasn’t at iLaw last week, I would have sure liked to have been at Gnomedex. The big news, of course, was Microsoft’s announcement that RSS was going to be integrated into the next version of IE. (Wonder what Firefox will have by then.)

But the even bigger news was that there was a presentation on “Blogs in the Classroom” as well! Kathy Gill at the University of Washington gave it, and she gave some surprising stats about the blog knowledge of her incoming students: 89% had sipped the blog juice in one form or another, but only 7% had even heard of Flickr. Sheesh.

I posted this earlier, but I got a follow up from the Wall Street Journal reporter that he’s still looking for some family blogging stories to include in an article he’s writing. See the earlier post for details and, if you have some experiences to share, either come back here and leave a comment or click the e-mail link above right and I’ll send along your interest. (And btw, if “Mary” who commented on the original post is still out there, please get in touch.)
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Read/Write Web
One of the most obvious changes in thinking that the Read/Write Web demands of educators is the idea that we can continue to look at content and curriculum in traditional ways. Textbooks are on the verge of irrelevance, and teachers who continue to see themselves as content experts instead of content connectors will soon follow suit. We used to be able to control what our students consumed about the topics we taught. No longer.

Konrad Glogowski gets that in a big way, and it’s just been such a kick to read his evolution to this new way of thinking about curriculum. He’s handed much of the responsibility for what happens in the classroom to his students, and in his reflection on that process in his post today, the results are clear. As he puts it, he has been “dethroned.”

<blockquote>Instead, having a blogging community allowed my students to create a repository of texts and ideas, all centred around the same general topic. No one seemed overwhelmed. No one complained. Students felt compelled to research and write about issues related to the novel that I have chosen for the last term of the year. So, content generation began with me but my contribution of one text blossomed into a community of inquirers and a community of content generating teenagers who did not seem to mind the sheer number of resources they were learning about. Whatís more, they kept contributing to this number by creating their own texts, texts that were generated throught their interaction with other texts. Every entry and every comment became a new text. Every entry was a text generated by a learner in the process of enaging with knowledge or with a response of another learner. Soon, their blogs were filled with entries written not only in response to articles they found but also in response to entries written by their peers. I started seeing conversations.</blockquote>
Right now, to me at least, that description sets the standard of what we all should be trying to do. Read the whole thing.

Back to iLaw: Yochai Benkler did a presentation on “The Internet and Political Values” yesterday that was, for the most part, way over my head, but the parts that I did get were pretty enlightening. One thing that really stuck was his deconstruction of the Long Tail, where it appears that there are a few blogs that get lots of readers and many, many blogs that get just a few. In the larger view, this is true, but what’s significant is when you break it down into clusters of blogs by interest. Benkler showed that within interest groups, the distribution is pretty standard: some blogs have a lot of readers, most blogs have a fair number (in relative terms) and some have very few. His point, I think, was that as the blogosphere grows larger, there will still be great opportunity for new bloggers to become significant contributors within their interest groups. Think of it as a lot of mini blogospheres, similar to our growing K-12 edublogger sphere. There have been so many great new voices added to our mix over the past six months or so, and that only promises to continue.

The other thing he talked about which I found interesting was how quickly the blogosphere can organize to take political action. He used the Sinclair Broadcasting Group story from last year as an example. Within a week after announcing they would run a controversial program about John Kerry, bloggers brought about movement against local advertisers of Sinclair that eventually caused the company’s stock price to go down and to them pulling the program. It was a pretty powerful case study.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay the full day today. My brain is spinning once again, not quite as buzzed as after last year, but buzzed nonetheless. It’s hard to capture it in one general thought or idea, but if I had to, I’d say the message here is that the huge waves of change caused by the Read/Write Web are just growing larger, that “the law” does not fully understand the implications of these changes, yet, and that it’s going to be a very interesting (and messy) decade ahead. Sounds right for education as well.
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I had the good fortune to chat with Charles Nesson for about 10 minutes yesterday…he happened to be walking by when I was looking at his picture hanging among all of the tenured Harvard law professors on the walls of one of the buildings here. Somehow we started talking about Wikipedia, and he mentioned that his wife was a teacher and that she was trying to understand the implications of Wikipedia as well. The story goes that her students run to Wikipedia when they are assigned research, which rightfully concerns her and her colleagues. So when her students go beyond Wikipedia to gather their research, at the end of that process she asks them to compare what they’ve written to the online entry. Invariaby, what the students create is better than Wikipedia. Teachable moment, right?

Here’s the kicker. I asked him if she then took the next step, if she had her students then add what they had learned to the Wikipedia entry. And it was obvious to me that he had the same idea. But the answer was no, she didn’t. I got the sense that the ramifications of doing so, good or bad, were just too unclear, too far outside the comfort zone.

And just now, that was all pretty much borne out when they created a wiki for participants to “practice” on. We were all supposed to by parents in a school district that was failing academically, and we were supposed to start rewriting the curriculum. It was, let’s say, less than a success, for a number of reasons, not the least of which that very few had a clear idea of what wikis were all about or how they worked. You could tell that a lot of people just thought the whole concept was pretty much of a non-starter.

(Cross posted to ETI) So I think we can safely say that thousands of teachers are now using blogs in their classrooms. As Tom points out, most have started at the digital organizer stage, the easy to update class portal model with, in some cases, the ability for students to comment and discuss topics of the day. Some have gotten to the point where they’re letting students create content in their own spaces in an e-portfolio type of way. And let me just say, in response to Tom’s little jab, that blogs can fit a whole bunch of different pedagogical aims, all of which, if they work well, would earn a “seal of approval.”

But, I also have to take the bait. (Can’t help myself.) Because Tom should have titled his post “Using Blogs in the Classroom” instead of turning the noun into a verb. (In fact, I find it really interesting how he substitutes the verb for the noun throughout his post.) All cost/benefit analysis aside, blogs can be a tool for learning, not just communicating and storing work. But the learning comes from the blogging, the sustained reflective, hypertextual, critical writing about meaningful topics for an audience. The fact that hardly anyone, journalists or educators alike (especially blogging educators,) rarely acknowledge that distinction is really a shame, I think, because it doesn’t highlight the potential of the tool for those who may not know about it. When all they read about is schools blocking and banning blogs without learning about the real upside that might make them worth it, it’s no wonder all they see is hassle.

So, even though he didn’t mean it the way he wrote it, I agree with Tom that right now “blogging isn’t going anywhere.” And that’s too bad.

So like last year, this iLaw is pretty mind numbing stuff, in a good, challenging way. Jonathan Zittrain was great, Lessig his usual amazing self.

Yochai Benkler was the most interesting for me, however. His lecture was on “The Rise of the Networked Economy” (blogged here). What struck a real chord for me was the way he described the culture that we are entering. We have the “radical decentralization of production,” and a time when “users are becoming co-discoverers of what they can do.” Good stuff.

Right now Charlie Nesson is doing a “Socratic Exercise” about “Digital Discovery.” It’s similar to the great “Ethics in America” hypothetical real-life scenario shows that he did on PBS about 15 years ago. (I remember the one he did right after the Gary Hart affair on journalistic privacy and politicians.) This time it’s a stolen laptop with merger documents on it and all sorts of sensitive data, and, maybe some pornography. What to do?

So thanks to everyone for their podcast suggestions for the drive up here to Harvard. (Now I need five hours more for the trip back…) And thanks especially to Bud for the pointer to Open Source by Chris Lydon whose interview with Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger and Dave Winer got me thinking more than any other.

Especially the first Dave who spoke briefly about how Web 2.0 is changing his kids’ education and learning habits. Basically, they are practicing social knowledge acquisition, sharing answers and ideas over IM, yet getting graded primarily by how much they can regurgitate as individuals. We’re ignoring the social side of what the Internet is doing. Kids, he said, know the way to be smart is to have smart friends, kind of that “know-where” learning idea of George Siemens that I’ve written about here before.

But here’s what I’m struggling with, and to be honest, I’m not sure why it’s sticking in my brain to the extent it is. There is, I’m feeling, some shift here that we’re going to have to work through regarding our expectations of originality, some redefinition of plagiarism or what our expectations are. If knowledge gets constructed socially, if we and our students are learning by remixing (and yes, I listened to Lessig on the way up as well,) then I guess the question is do our teacherly ideas about original ideas have to be rethought? I hate how muddled this is, but I’m hoping maybe I can corner one of the iLaw gang today or tomorrow to see what they think.

The other interesting idea in the Open Source show was when Weinberger talked about how even our conception of a document has to change, how for hundreds of years we’ve thought of a report or a story as a container of information. But now, with hypertext, a document’s value comes not so much from what it holds but from where it points out of itself to others. I think the reality is that we’re going to have to start teaching students to give research back to us in a web-ified form, complete with links. In five years when we’ve moved beyond paper, hypertext writing (read “blogging”) is going to be a basic literacy. The final mile will be to publish all of that writing in a public blog/portfolio space. Then we’ll be cranking…

I love this story about Amy Gahran (whose Furl feed is worth following, btw) putting together a group of citizen journalists to cover a controversial housing development in her town. And immediately it makes me ask why we shouldn’t be putting together groups of our students to do the same type of real life work.

Although I love my current job, the changes we’ve seen over the past four years makes me yearn for my old journalism classes simply because of the real life stuff they could be doing. Fifteen years ago, I had them do “real” stories, but so few of them ended up being read by any “real” audience that they were pretty much meaningless (aside, of course, for the grade.) Now, as the article indicates, newspaper editors around the country are embracing the idea that citizen (including student) journalists have an important role to play in the collection and contribution of stories that might otherwise not be covered as well or at all. Real work. Real audiences. And even if local papers aren’t interested, our students can still publish and invite comment on their own sites.

And it’s not just our student journalists doing journalism. It’s oral histories about the community in Social Studies and experiments on local environments in science and literary interpretations in English and area museum tours in art all done by students and published in meaningful ways to audiences outside of the classroom. Why shouldn’t every school Website be a portfolio of student work for that community? A place where people can come to find out about not only their schools but about their own spaces. Why shouldn’t we be teaching students that the work they create in our classrooms no longer has to end up in the dumpster at the end of the school year? Or that what’s more important than the grade is the standard of publishing excellence that we set? Or that contributing their work for others to build upon is the new way of the world?

So I have a five hour drive in front of my tomorrow to get to Boston and iLaw and five hours back on Friday. That’s a potential 10-hour time-shifted, on demand, learning never stops, read/write Web techfest opportunity that I want to make the most of. (What’s a radio, anyway?) I’m saving up the latest Gillmor Gang, and I’ve got the latest from IT Conversations and the usualedsuspects. But I’m open to suggestions…what’s REALLY good that you’ve been listening to?